As part of EMC’s comprehensive private cloud strategy, standardizing and simplifying data center infrastructure is a critical component for customers. To accomplish that, EMC, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, is extending its strength in storage networking by delivering world-class products and expanded services for Ethernet-based storage, data centers and private clouds. With this new converged networks portfolio, EMC can help customers address key data center challenges, such as network sprawl, complexity and spiraling power and cooling costs.
Virtual Data Centers Require Flexible, Converged Networking Technologies

To maximize the agility, costs savings and improved quality of service associated with virtualization, organizations are looking to replace multiple separate networks with converged networks, single network infrastructures designed specifically for the needs of virtualized storage and server environments. As the leading provider of enterprise storage networking for more than a decade, EMC, with its world wide partner ecosystem, is uniquely positioned to help customers simplify this transition and gain the maximum benefits from their new converged network strategy.

Over the next several months, EMC plans to introduce:

* An expanded portfolio of converged networking services for Ethernet environments, including network assessment, planning, design and implementation services, supporting a range of protocols – including Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), iSCSI and Network Attached Storage.
* An enhanced suite of tools to assist with the sizing, analysis, design and migration to converged networks.
* New Ethernet competencies for EMC Technology Solutions and Services personnel worldwide to better educate customers and deliver Ethernet-based networking and storage solutions.
* A full range of Brocade 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switch products.
* A data center system solution offering consisting of select Cisco Nexus 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switch products.

Industry Analyst Quote

Charles King, principal analyst, of Pund-IT, Inc. said, “With enterprises leveraging virtualization more and more in their data centers, a new breed of robust network connectivity is becoming necessary. As a result, customers will look to those vendors who can put together packages that advance new IT strategies while also leveraging existing data center investments. EMC’s proven expertise and capabilities in delivering strategy, planning, implementation and management of end-to-end solutions for virtualized environments will help new and existing customers successfully move to the cloud.”
New EMC Services for Converged Networks

Expanding on its current offerings around FCoE solutions and services, EMC is delivering new services and tools to help customers advance their IT networking strategies and transition to private cloud environments. These new services will enable customers to accelerate the planning, design and implementation of converged network solutions and provide higher levels of performance, availability and mobility for virtualized data centers.

These solutions allow customers to architect a dynamic data center, respond to constantly changing business priorities, support advanced network-based technologies, like VMware VMotion and Microsoft LiveMigration, and guarantee application performance and availability. In addition, EMC has developed advanced tools to help customers migrate their existing storage network infrastructure to a converged network, as well as size their environments to support replication and backup activities.

Howard Elias, President and Chief Operating Officer of EMC’s Information Infrastructure and Cloud Services, said, “Customers today are on their journey to the private cloud by virtualizing servers, networks and storage. The advent of converged networks will simplify network challenges and create the data center infrastructure required to realize the full potential of private clouds. EMC’s leadership in virtual storage products, security and management solutions for virtualized environments combined with the upcoming portfolio of Ethernet solutions will enable EMC and our channel partners to give customers the needed ingredients to take their virtual data centers to the next level.”

Later in 2010, EMC will offer additional services and solutions that leverage these next-generation technologies – including consulting and IT services, solutions reference architectures and technical training and certification.

ReliaCloud, the new service that offers small-to-medium-sized enterprises cloud computing servers and storage space, has announced a new partnership with enStratus, a national cloud management platform that delivers governance for enterprise applications in the cloud. Together ReliaCloud and enStratus offer companies a seamless, manageable cloud computing service. The two organizations are also joining forces to sponsor 2010 CloudCamp events and an April 7, 2010, webinar to educate information technology professionals about the business advantages of using cloud computing.

To go beyond basic cloud computing service, ReliaCloud customers now have access to a suite of software management tools from enStratus that are also used with Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Microsoft Azure platforms to maximize:

• Security – enStratus has a patent-pending security architecture that ensures separation of security keys from encrypted data and provides advanced user management and activity logs for compliance;
• Reliability – Automated management tools, auto-recovery engine and unique clustering capabilities that minimize human error and enable support of service level agreements up to 99.9999 percent; and
• Cloud Independence – enStratus provides business continuity through cloud-independent backups as well as cross-cloud disaster recovery.

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NetSuite Inc,a leading vendor of cloud computing business management software suites, today announced that it has entered into a strategic partnership with Wipro Technologies, the global IT services business of Wipro Limited ( WIT). The partnership aims to set a new standard for cloud solutions expertise that large organizations worldwide can rely on for advancing their mission-critical business processes. The current scope of the partnership focuses on the Asia-Pacific market with future expansion planned for North America.

Echoing with current market demands, Wipro has been working on a number of strategic initiatives to empower its cloud computing capabilities. This new partnership with NetSuite is a part of a broader Wipro-level initiative to build a leadership position in providing, implementing and supporting application development on Cloud and SaaS platforms.

“As we progress in an era of virtualization, where the emphasis is on helping companies achieve the most efficient and lowest cost infrastructure, cloud computing resounds as an inevitable and highly attractive option,” said Sangita Singh, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Application Services, Wipro Technologies. “This partnership, which combines Wipro’s IT and business process expertise with NetSuite’s deep functionality in cloud business applications, has the potential to be a game-changer for organizations that demand guaranteed customer satisfaction when it comes to mission-critical business functionality in the cloud.”

“As large organizations move mission-critical business processes to the cloud, partnerships between global IT services leaders like Wipro and technology leaders such as NetSuite are essential,” said Zach Nelson, NetSuite CEO. “This landmark partnership shows the unstoppable momentum of IT infrastructure moving to the cloud.”

The acquisition of leading cloud integration company Cast Iron Systems will position IBM as leader in cloud computing technology

IBM will expand into cloud computing services with the acquisition of California-based Cast Iron Systems, a leader in cloud integration software, appliances and services.
Cloudcomputing allows businesses to reduce costs and improve efficiency in the workplace. The cloud computing market is expected to grow significantly over the next few years, from $47 billion in 2008 to over $126 billion in 2012.
The acquisition allows IBM to help businesses adopt cloud computing applications and on-premise systems and integrate them into their current system. IBM will also improve their capabilities for the hybrid cloud model, which allows businesses to integrate data from on-premise applications with both public and private cloud systems. Since Cast Iron uses hundreds of pre-built templates, there is no need for custom coding, allowing the integrations to be made within the span of days not weeks, saving their clients both time and money.
“The integration challenges Cast Iron Systems is tackling are crucial to clients who are looking to adopt alternative delivery models to manage their businesses,” said Craig Hayman, general manager, IBM WebSphere in a statement.  ”The combination of IBM and Cast Iron Systems will make it easy for clients to integrate business applications, no matter where those applications reside.  This will give clients greater agility and as a result, better business outcomes.”
IBM is expected to support and enhance the technologies of Cast Iron Systems. In addition, their clients, including Peet’s Coffee & Tea, salesforce.com, and PGP Corporation, will benefit from the IBM portfolio of technologies and services.
The employees of Cast Iron systems will be fully integrated into IBM.

With VMforce, there’s no hardware to manage—and no software stack to install, patch, tune, or upgrade. Just drag and drop your Java app to VMforce to deploy. Java developers can add built-in collaboration, mobile, and analytics components to their apps. All apps on VMforce are elastic, so you never have to worry about scaling up app servers, databases, or infrastructure.

Any company with Java development resources and skillsets can now easily develop enterprise Java apps locally and deploy them to the cloud. VMforce supports standard Java code, including POJOs, JSPs, and Servlets, along with the popular Spring Framework. With VMforce, you can also easily migrate existing enterprise Java apps to the cloud and avoid cloud lock-in.

VMforce is delivered by two of the most trusted industry leaders, salesforce.com and VMware. VMware provides the most reliable virtualization technology. Force.com is the world’s most secure cloud computing platform. All of your Java apps can now run on this same trusted infrastructure—an infrastructure that’s passed the most stringent security certifications, including ISO 27001, SysTrust, and SAS70 Type II.
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At the Cloud Computing Expo held this week in New York, executives from Microsoft and Oracle shared how they see cloud computing working its way into the enterprise.

The companies offered disparate visions, however, with Microsoft emphasizing its public cloud offerings and Oracle touting tools for building out internal clouds.

Both software giants agreed, however, that enterprise use of clouds is best done on an as-needed basis, in what their executives called “a hybrid model.”

“I’d argue that if you’d run today’s applications in the cloud with exactly the same utilization as you would in your own data center … [it] will probably cost you more,” said Hal Stern, Oracle president and former Sun Microsystems chief technology officer for services, during one talk.

The advantage of the cloud, Stern argued, is elasticity. It is those “impulse functions of demand, where you want to go to 100 CPUs to 1,000 CPUs, but give them back,” he said.

“If you look at every one of the cases that has been held up as a great case of public cloud, they ran for a period time and then put the resources back,” Stern said. “That’s what made them cost effective.”

Routine daily functions, such as payroll or supply chain, may not benefit as much in a cloud deployment (though consumed in a software-as-a-service model, they may reduce complexity).

So the challenge for organizations, Stern contended, is to prepare an enterprise infrastructure for a hybrid model, or a model in which some work is computed in house while other jobs are executed in the cloud. “If we really good at defining that packaging and release engineering, we can use a mix of public and private resources,” he said.

As it happens, Oracle chose this conference to announce a new set of products that speed the packaging and deployment of internal applications.

One offering, the Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder (OVAB) allows organizations to create virtual appliances from commonly used infrastructure programs, such as Web servers and databases, so they can be pulled off the shelf and quickly deployed.

“When building multitier applications, it is inevitable that you will have to piece together multiple components,” said Arvind Jain, Oracle product strategy director, in a presentation of the new technologies. “The ideal environment for the application developer teams would be an IT infrastructure that would be easily and readily provisioned, so the teams can focus on the application logic.”

The other offering, the Oracle WebLogic Suite Virtualization Option, is designed to speed run-times of virtualized Java applications by eliminating the guest operating system that would otherwise be needed to run the application in a virtual container.

This second package consists of a WebLogic application server integrated the Oracle JRockit Virtual Edition, a version of its Java runtime engine tweaked to run on the Oracle Virtual Machine virtualization platform.

“Taking out the guest OS might seem completely counter-intuitive. But JRockit Virtual Edition incorporates the pieces that you need for the VM to run,” said Erik Bergenholtz, Oracle director of product management, during the same presentation.

Bergenholtz noted taking out the guest OS in each virtual machine means more virtual machines can be packed on a server, and they could run faster as well.

In internal tests, Oracle has found that this approach can speed run-times by 33 percent: While a reference application running on standard WebLogic server executed 225 operations per second, the WebServer/JRocket combo executed 348 operations per second.

While Oracle emphasized the tools needed to quick cloud and virtual deployments, Microsoft emphasized its public cloud offerings, while also touting the hybrid approach.

“We are very serious about the cloud. We view it as a natural extension of on-premise software,” said Yousef Khalidi, a Microsoft distinguished engineer working on the Microsoft Azure cloud offering, during his talk. “We believe in a hybrid model going forward, that would span the whole spectrum.”

Cloud computing is different from simply rehosting, for a number of reasons, Khalidi said.

For one, applications must be built with “scale-out architectures, rather than scale-up architectures,” he said. This means that if you need an application to serve more users, you should be able to spin out more instances of that application. “You have to think about state in a different way.”

The software must be set up on a services-based operational model. “This model emphasizes application service management, not server management. If you still have to patch the virtual machines and worry about firewalls, then that’s not cloud computing. That’s more like hosting,” he said.

On the hardware side, the cloud model has to be one of “very large uniform systems,” he said. “The topology is basically fixed.” This approach minimizes the amount of configuration needed for setting up a new cloud-based service. This also allows a service to be run anywhere.

Khalidi’s talk focused on what enterprise cloud services Microsoft already runs. Versions of Windows Server, SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange and other Microsoft programs are available as a service, he noted.

The company also commercially offers its Windows Azure “operating system in the cloud,” which allows organizations to build and run their own cloud-based applications. The software is updated frequently and payments can be done on either per-usage or volume discounting.

“We want to provide you the power of choice: You decide, based on your business needs, where you want to [run] the application,” Khalidi told the audience. “You can acquire software and run it yourself, you [can] use a host model, a compute cloud model, or a hybrid model.”

One choice Khalidi did not discuss much was that of running a private cloud, or run services in a cloud model for internal consumption, from within an organization’s firewalls.

During the question-and-answer session, one audience member asked if Microsoft would release the Azure tools so they could be used for private clouds. Khalidi said the Microsoft would release these tools, but that “they are not there yet,” in terms of being packaged for private cloud use.

Later, in a chat with IDG News Service, Khalidi said that Microsoft plans not only to offer most of its software as cloud offerings, but also offer the technologies it uses for enabling cloud services as stand-alone products. The two will go hand-in-hand, he said.

Jigsaw’s unique Wikipedia-style crowd-sourcing model delivers the world’s most complete, accurate and up-to-date business contact data

The combination of Jigsaw and salesforce.com will allow companies to easily find, purchase and manage data that is seamlessly integrated with their CRM apps

Salesforce.com makes strategic entry into the $3 billion market for cloud-based data services

With Jigsaw and salesforce.com, data service providers like D&B, Hoover’s and LexisNexis have the opportunity to expand existing partnerships to deliver new services in the cloud

San Francisco, April 21, 2010 – Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the enterprise cloud computing (http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/) company, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Jigsaw, the leader in crowd-sourced data services in the cloud. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions.

Jigsaw’s unique Wikipedia-style crowd-sourcing model delivers the world’s most complete, accurate and up-to-date business contact data. Since Jigsaw’s offering is delivered in the cloud, companies can focus on realizing success instead of focusing on legacy enterprise data management models that require expensive integration and continuous, dedicated maintenance. The acquisition will combine the power of salesforce.com’s suite of CRM applications and leading enterprise cloud platform with Jigsaw’s cloud-based model for the automation of acquiring, completing and cleansing business contact data. Jigsaw’s data cloud platform also creates an enormous opportunity for developers and independent software vendors to deliver entirely new applications that leverage the business contact data found in Jigsaw. The proposed acquisition will mark salesforce.com’s strategic entry into the $3 billion market for cloud-based business to business data services, and will create new opportunities for salesforce.com to partner with information services companies like D&B, Hoover’s and LexisNexis.

Companies and professionals, whether or not already salesforce.com customers, can become members of the Jigsaw community by sharing common contact data that is found on a business card, including name, title, company, mailing address, business telephone number and e-mail address. Any Jigsaw.com community member can access the database, and can accumulate points through helping to maintain data quality. These points may be redeemed for access to additional records. In addition, companies or professionals may utilize the Jigsaw service by purchasing contact data. Jigsaw also offers premium automated data cleansing services to update and enrich data critical to success for any CRM deployment for a subscription-based fee. Jigsaw sets the standard among business contact data service providers by allowing business professionals included in the database to easily edit their information, set their contact preferences or if they choose, opt out of the listing.

New York City – Cloud Expo – April 20, 2010 – TwinStrata, Inc., founded in 2007, debuts today with its vision for intelligent storage cloud solutions. Taking an innovative approach, the company is bringing to market cloud storage enablement software solutions to help mid-sized companies in a variety of industries address challenges related to protecting and managing the growth of business application data.

Operational Challenges of Data Management

Today’s IT data management teams are tasked with selecting solutions that maintain the integrity and availability of data, especially higher value data related to business critical applications. Storage-related solutions need to easily and quickly scale to accommodate future data growth and not require capital intensive upgrades when capacity limits are reached. They must support multiple data formats for all types of business applications. In addition, companies should understand the impact an application outage will have on each line-of-business or on the company as a whole in order to implement appropriate data recovery operations.

Cloud Technology Ecosystems

To help companies achieve business agility and efficiency, IT alignment and cost management, several ecosystems started by industry-leading vendors have emerged. EMC with its EMC Atmos Velocity Program and Amazon with its Amazon Web Services are each an example of an ecosystem of solution providers developing cloud enablement solutions that leverage their respective cloud services. These ecosystems will have a significant impact on storage cloud adoption.

Corporations using solutions from these ecosystems benefit from the cloud. They can now instantly respond to changing business requirements by taking advantage of an adaptable infrastructure and adding resources as needed. Storage cloud infrastructures eliminate lengthy change management cycles when bringing new storage infrastructure online and optimize IT administrative processes to drive efficiency and improve staff productivity.

“Cloud enablement solutions, like the one TwinStrata offers, will help accelerate corporate cloud storage adoption,” said Terri McClure, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Companies can realize the availability, security and performance characteristics of local storage, without the capital investment and overhead of housing and managing storage themselves.”

“TwinStrata is working with customers around the world and with industry-leading global technology companies to define and develop intelligent storage cloud architectures and solutions,” said TwinStrata CEO & Co-Founder Nicos Vekiarides.

“The EMC Velocity2 Atmos Partner Program demonstrates our commitment to deliver innovative storage solutions that address the growing needs of our partners seeking to leverage cloud infrastructure. We believe there is an opportunity and approach to cloud storage that delivers financial and functional benefits to both our Partners and the Customers they serve,” said Mike Feinberg, Senior Vice President of EMC Cloud Infrastructure Group. “By making our cloud infrastructure accessible and allowing easy API integration, we enable our partners to develop cloud enablement solutions to help customers realize business agility, drive IT operational efficiency, and improve cost controls. We are pleased to work with TwinStrata to embrace and deliver real-world business value to our joint customers, globally.”

Intelligent Storage Cloud, Cloud Enablement Solutions

Intelligent storage clouds consist of storage-as-a-service offerings combined with intelligent cloud storage enablement solutions. Cloud storage enablement solutions address the primary concerns that users have expressed regarding enterprise IT adoption of cloud storage solutions and deliver the following features:

• Compute Anywhere™ application accessibility: on/off-premise, in the cloud
• Non-disruptive integration with business applications
• Support for all industry file systems and block-level access
• Intelligent caching architecture that delivers local performance
• Support for virtual and physical IT environments
• Ease of deployment, ability to manage in self-service manner via UI, CLI and API
• Local and cloud data copies, zero-footprint snapshots
• Encryption for security
• Bandwidth savings via caching, compression, deduplication
• Support for multiple cloud providers, with data mobility across providers
• Support for providers that offer SLAs for regulatory & compliance requirements

CloudShare’s Patent-Pending FastUpload™ Technology Lets Users Import VMware-based IT Environments as a Cloud-Based Service in Under 15 minutes

PALO ALTO, Calif. – April 19, 2010 – CloudShare today announced FastUpload ™ , a new feature that provides ‘the missing link’ for companies looking to quickly and easily move virtual machines (VMs), unchanged, to the Cloud. With CloudShare FastUpload, users can upload existing in-house VMware-based virtual IT environments and make them available as a Cloud-based service, in as little as 15 minutes.

“CloudShare provides the fastest, cleanest way I’ve seen to get VMware VMs into the Cloud, without needing expensive equipment or a lengthy process on the back end. I was literally up and running with full remote access in minutes,” said David Q Ta, Senior Linux Administrator at Riverbed Technology and former member of VMware’s Engineering team. “CloudShare’s FastUpload is the antidote for anyone suffering Cloud migration headaches — it completely removes one of the fundamental roadblocks to keeping infrastructure in the Cloud, namely, the ability to work offline.”

While Cloud Computing continues to dominate much of the IT-related conversations taking place today, even the most sophisticated IT users are still trying to determine how to make the transition from local physical or virtual environments into the Cloud. The idea of having to re-architect systems, rewrite code, or manage delays typically associated with FedExing storage media to Cloud providers generates a high level of skepticism among IT staff, not to mention significantly increasing expenses and security risks.

CloudShare alleviates such concerns by providing a way for users to extend access to – or simply move – their virtual infrastructure, from the enterprise to the Cloud, with the same ease of use as WebEx but on a platform robust and secure enough to support companies like Cisco, VMware, SAP and McAfee.

“‘How do I move my existing applications?’ is often the first question asked by organizations adopting Cloud Computing environments,” said Paul Burns, President of Neovise, an IT industry analyst firm focused on Cloud Computing. “There are a number of approaches which can involve the adoption of new processes; such demand significant investments of time and money. CloudShare FastUpload avoids all that so IT can more quickly start reaping the benefits that brought them to the Cloud in the first place.”

CloudShare’s technology is already in use by Fortune 500 software sales engineers, IT professionals and enterprise teams for sales demos, POCs, and training. Since the launch of CloudShare Pro, in February 2010, over one thousand sales, IT, training, and other business users have adopted CloudShare Pro, creating over several thousand hands-on IT environments and generating over ten thousand VM demo hours.

“With FastUpload, CloudShare continues to make the Cloud accessible, opening up a new and innovative way for tech support, remote employees, developers, and other individual users to upsynch and share their existing Virtual Machines,” said Zvi Guterman, CEO of CloudShare. “Complementary to hosting services like VMforce, CloudShare FastUpload represents the easiest, fastest onramp for companies to get into Cloud. Think ‘Star Trek Teleporter meets IT Infrastructure.”

Apr 19, 2010 — NetSuite, a vendor of cloud computing business management software suites, announced the immediate availability of SuiteCloud 2.0, the newest version of its cloud development platform for building and deploying cloud business applications.

“The advances in SuiteCloud 2.0 create substantial competitive advantages for ISVs and developers looking to embrace cloud computing and expand their practices into new verticals,” said Mike Fauscette, Group VP, Software Business Solutions, Integration, Development and Application Strategies at IDC. “No other cloud computing platform offers the breadth of enterprise functionality that NetSuite delivers, making it an ideal choice for complex business processes.” According to NetSuite, SuiteCloud 2.0’s capabilities enable enterprises to take full advantage of the significant economic, productivity and development benefits of cloud computing, including multi-tenant, always-on SaaS infrastructure and scalable, integrated applications for Accounting/ERP, CRM and Ecommerce. SuiteCloud 2.0 offers a range of development tools, services and third-party software designed to help customers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and channel businesses meet ever-changing business process needs across a range of industries.”